'Free will' is a way of narrating your life and is also a way of awareness and response to living. Those who deny it probably mean no more than that the first of these ways is a hindrance to the second, but this is based on a naïve understanding of the relation between these two inescapable modes.

A self is no self, not an object or an explanation, and that is why it is a self. And in the same way, a no self is a self, since only a self would care or even raise the question, and that is why it is no self. This ought to be the logic used and not the obtuse denial and tedious arguments on unsound bases.

No truly metaphysical question can ever be decisively settled one way or the other, and insofar as this assertion is itself metaphysical, it too is undecidable. This assertion is scandalous only from the position that would negate all metaphysics in the name of positivism, but in fact is equally derivable from that starting point by the usual sort of gödelian diagonalisation. In the same way it is necessarily ambiguous whether this concerns what is assertable or what is, but its consequences are nonetheless empirical.

In simplest terms the possibility of metaphysics is equivalent to the existence of freedom (of the will). But if metaphysics is impossible it cannot be provably impossible, or more weakly, known to be impossible, since that would constitute metaphysics. So, if there is no freedom of the will there can be no valid acknowledgment of this unfreedom since it would have to be a free acknowledgment. That there are cases where metaphysics is taken to prove the absence of freedom of the will, is only because of the 'of the will' part of the assertion, which was always problematic, since this way of phrasing it brings with it a lot of baggage that is easily targeted. All of the key words here have to be interpreted generously, but that does not necessarily render them void. The same understanding can be banished at one level of interpretation only because it reappears at another. So that the acceptance of levels of interpretation is also equivalent to the possibility metaphysics.

If you think of the background void in which experiencing arises the image is that of a great space, but it does not contain the physical space of your world but only the space required for the here and now event, and that is infinitesimally small. All of the inflation which accounts for the actionable world is as it were subsequent to the here and now which is all that experiencing is. What tricks you is its magical facility of aboutness, this proto-relationality is all that is needed to blow up a world.

Most of it seems to take place somewhere between the meta- and the meta-meta- of experiencing. Every time you try to climb down the ladder, no matter how softly softly you go, you end further up. Is there a bottom at all? Probably not, it's not really that kind of ladder, in the same way that what you call experiencing is nothing like that at all, but a way of giving up some assumptions in order to hold more tightly to others. The ladder hangs in mid air, if you want to get to the bottom you need to jump.